All chaos, no organization - Producer Liquid Advertising, Inc. Employee Review

I appreciate the frank feedback about the company, and I regret that you found your experience here so frustrating. Before I respond to the negative points, thank you very much for the wonderful things you said about our employees. I agree with you 100 percent. Our employees are incredible! They are our greatest asset and many are “dope af” as you noted. You mentioned that your year was spent working 12-14 hour days. Like many agencies we experience crunch times where employees do work long hours. But it should not be the norm. This problem is more acute in the media department where hiring freelance talent during times of high workload is often difficult or impossible. We are working hard to up the pace of hiring to alleviate the problem, but this continues to be a challenge. I pulled average hours worked per week in the creative department for all of 2021. The average hours worked per week was 43. The maximum average weekly hours in any given week was when it peaked at 50 during a particularly busy period. This isn’t to say that individual employees didn’t put in a lot of long days and weeks. And I can’t vouch that everyone filled in all their hours correctly. But it shouldn’t have been a permanent crunch time. If it was for you, it would have been okay to say “no more … I’ve reached my limit.” I’m sorry if you didn’t feel like that was an option. Or if you did so, you felt unsupported. I hope other employees will read this and know that they can. To your point that the agency lacks structure: I take full blame for this. I personally enjoy fluidity over structure. It’s in the agency name! It is my feeling that it’s best to give people a great deal of flexibility to handle things in their own manner. What works best for one department, team, client or individual may not be ideal for all. If two parties approach matters differently and both feel their solution is best, I’m happy to let them each proceed - and if that creates some inefficiencies along the way, I’m okay with that as long as it doesn’t cause problems with work product. This approach is not ideal for everyone, and I know some people dislike it. But there are also a large number of people who enjoy working at Liquid+Arcade specifically for this freedom and flexibility and do not want to return to larger agencies and lose it. Every day our extremely talented employees are recruited by larger, more profitable agencies with deep pockets who can offer higher salaries. But despite this our turnover is lower than most agencies during this time of the great resignation. Some non-insignificant number of Liquid employees return to work here after sampling other options. Finally, to the suggestion that top staff lacks “real agency” experience: Liquid has approx. 100 employees in 4 cities in 3 countries. Our yearly billings exceed $175 million. Our clients are globally recognized brand names and we manage campaigns in over 40 countries. We’ve been profitable for 22 years straight, never taking on any debts or outside investors. We’ve weathered 2 financial crises and one global pandemic, the latter of which we survived not just without any layoffs, but growing 20 percent. We consistently share profits with employees and last year the average employee enjoyed a year-end bonus that was 16 percent of their salary. We are a real agency. While I worked at medium to small agencies prior to founding Liquid, that was exactly the sort of experience I needed to start an agency from scratch: A big picture view of the entire agency business from finance, legal and HR to operations. I look for similar traits in our department heads. I feel the suggestion here is that only a multinational agency owned by a public holding company is a real one. And only big agency experience is valuable. Among our VPs there are quite a few that have many years of the “real agency” experience you speak of and they tend to be of the opinion that they like it here. We can’t be the right agency for everyone, but we can be a good choice for some. I am truly sorry you didn’t enjoy your time at Liquid+Arcade. I do appreciate the hard work and long hours you put in here. 2021 was a challenging year and all our employees made sacrifices to make things work. I know that cash bonuses and perks like the trip to Puerto Vallarta don’t fully compensate for the pressures of working at Liquid all year but it is our small way of trying to say thanks. We will look to find ways to do more to show this appreciation in the year ahead. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. I hope you find great success and happiness. I’m available via e-mail and phone if you ever feel like discussing these matters in greater detail. Take care! -Will